Why the West is on Fire: The 328th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

On this, our 328th Evolutionary Lens livestream, we discuss fires in the West, both literal and metaphorical. First: the mayoral race in LA, and race politics. Then: rioting in Paris after a soccer win—not mere hooliganism, but also due to race politics and immigration. The World Cup is coming to Seattle—but what to do about the homeless people? Build a “low barrier” tiny home community out of sight of the tourists, where drug addicts are encouraged to relocate. New public toilets in Seattle were destroyed within weeks, though—will tiny homes be sufficient to protect soccer fans? Also: it’s pride month! At UCSC’s “Gender Affirming Gear” closet, students can get free binders, packers, and tucking kits! Knitting it all together: What is the West, what are its tenets, and is it worth saving? Yes.

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Caraway: Non-toxic, highly functional & beautiful cookware and bakeware. Save with their cookware set, and visit http://Carawayhome.com/DH10 to for an additional 10% off your next purchase. Also: spend over $495 and receive a Butcherbox FREE; spend over $795 and also get a FREE cast iron grill pan!

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Join us on Locals! Get access to our Discord server, exclusive live streams, live chats for all streams, and early access to many podcasts: https://darkhorse.locals.com/

Heather’s newsletter, Natural Selections (subscribe to get free weekly essays in your inbox): https://naturalselections.substack.com

Our book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, is available everywhere books are sold, including from Amazon: https://amzn.to/3AGANGg (commission earned)

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Mentioned in this episode:

LA mayoral race results: https://ktla.com/news/politics/los-angeles-mayor-primary-election/

Voting based on race: https://x.com/DrewPavlou/status/2061571066707972540?s=20

Rioting in Paris: https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2060870418014118162?s=20

Seattle toilets: https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/2061802513993490856

Tiny homes in Seattle: https://thepostmillennial.com/seattle-builds-tiny-home-village-for-citys-homeless-drug-users-displaced-by-fifa-world-cup-games

UCSC Queer Center: https://queer.ucsc.edu

UnClockable tucking kit: https://unclockable.com/products/unclockable-tuck-kit-2

Transcript

0:04

Hey folks, welcome to the 328th Dark Horse podcast live stream with me, Dr. Bret Weinstein and you, Dr. Heather Heying. You had just a nice cadence there. Yeah, I changed it up a little, but you know, that's the nature of the spice of life. After over 300 episodes, you gotta switch things up. Yep. Yep. Yeah. What's that? We're locked in. We're locked in. Okay. Yeah. So today we're going to talk about various unfortunate pieces of evidence that the West is burning both literally and metaphorical. Literally and metaphorical. That's often how it goes with civilizations. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So join us on locals for the watch party. And just a reminder that longtime viewers will know that YouTube demonetized us back in the summer of 2021 when we were talking about at the time, politically unconscionable things such as whether or not the vaccines were in fact safe and effective. And should there be mandates and were repurposed drugs such as Ibramectin actually viable treatments for a disease that is real, but not the scourge that we were being told it was for that. We got demonetized quietly without any fanfare. YouTube remonetized us last year. But it would appear that we are still being throttled. We're still being shadow banned and such. So we encourage you, if you are watching on YouTube, to please subscribe to the channel, like what you like, and share as much as you feel good about doing so with family and friends. And it helps if you're watching or listening on some other platform to do the equivalent there. It helps us everywhere and it's free to you. Indeed. And Bret, you have a couple of Patreon calls coming up this weekend, so you can also join Bret there at Patreon. Those are great conversations. Intimate. We have a lot of fun. It's a nice group of people and very welcoming of newcomers. So anyway, if you're interested in checking that out, I encourage you to do it and you'll see just how much fun it is. Indeed. And of course, we've got our locals watch party going on right now and we're not doing a Q&A after a day show, but whenever we do, that's available on locals and then it remains up for those of you who want to see it and missed it live. Without further ado, here are our amazing sponsors for this week. Our first sponsor is Timeline. Timeline makes mitopurae, which contains a powerful postbiotic that is hard to get from your diet alone. Your Lithin A. Your Lithin A is found primarily in pomegranates and has been the subject of hundreds of scientific or clinical studies, many of which find that it enhances mitochondrial function and cellular energy and improves muscle strength and endurance. But how does it work? Your mitochondria are the powerhouses of your cells. Like everything living, they decay over time and can get damaged. 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The data shows significant improvements in muscle strength, about 12%, with intake of your Lithin A. We observe clinically meaningful improvements with your Lithin A on aerobic endurance and physical performance, but do not notice a significant improvement on peak power output." Furthermore, in 2016, research published in Nature Medicine found that in mice, the beneficial effects of your Lithin A on muscle physiology were independent of diet or age. Take two soft gels of mitopurae a day for two months, and you may see significant improvements in your muscle strength and endurance. Mitopurae enhances your cell's ability to clean themselves up and regenerate new, healthy mitochondria. In combination with regular physical activity, mitopurae can help you stay strong and healthy into old age. Timeline is now offering 20% off your first order of mitopurae. Go to timeline.com slash darkhorse and use code darkhorse to get 20% off your order. That's T-I-M-E-L-I-N-E dot com slash darkhorse. When you say that damaged cells and mitochondria accumulate in joints, do you briefly flash on them gathering in like a hip? Spliffs? Oh. No, like a bar, I was thinking. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The like the old beaten down cells kind of hanging out over too many shots of vodka. Exactly. Or during prohibition, maybe in a speakeasy, something like that. Is there a pun coming? No. Let's see if I can come up with nothing comes to mind. Speakeasy seemed to come out of nowhere. Well, I just thought that I deserve, you know, in the interest of completeness. I thought I would mention that. Oh, sure. Speakeasy. And also spliffs. I don't think they do accumulate in spliffs. No, but I think spliffs create damage to cells. Yes. For sure. So there's the connection. But seriously, I actually, I hadn't been for a while, but I've been using timeline recently and I actually, you know, totally anecdotal, but I do feel like it does. It is helping with recovery time after exercise and just kind of making me feel a little bit less less achy when I feel achy. I really like that stuff. At the Better Way conference, we had a nice little discussion, proud to say led by me, in which the discussion about the fact that so much evidence was being dismissed as anecdote. And I pointed out to them that anecdote is a synonym for observation, which is the first step of the scientific method and you should not be intimidated away. True. And we I mean, we've talked about this a lot, but I would say, you know, a single person who has not controlled for absolutely everything in their environment because A, you can't and B, I haven't attempted to. After you know, a week or so of re-upping use of something is not actually sufficient to say this is what did that. Oh, no, it's an observation and it justifies, you know, in your case, a personal experiment. You continue using it and you continue to see the effect if you stopped using it with the effect, go away, that kind of thing. Yeah. And I guess, you know, for many people and, you know, in fact, this applies to our second sponsor this week to ARMRA Colostrum, which I feel very similarly about. I feel like I feel like there is an effect. There is research to suggest that there is in both cases with regard to timeline might appear from timeline and ARMRA, which is Colostrum. But I personally, because I like to eat real food that varies with the seasons and sometimes I want to walk and sometimes I want to bike and sometimes I want to get a Pilates, like I just want to do a lot of different things and not feel constrained to making myself a precise experiment. I will never know for sure. Sure. But that's why they ran the experiments they did. Exactly. So our second sponsor this week, as I mentioned, is ARMRA Colostrum, an ancient bioactive whole food. We live in an age of hyper novelty. That is, even though humans are the most adaptable species on the planet, even we can't keep up with the rate of change that we are enacting on ourselves. We are bathed in electromagnetic fields, artificial light, seed oils, hopefully not literally bathed in seed oils, but you never know, microplastics, endocrine disruptors in our air, water, food and textiles. And there are myriad other modern stressors like overcrowding and having too little control over our own choices in life. But there are things that you can control. One of them is this. You can strengthen your immune health with a bioactive whole food that is ARMRA Colostrum. All of that hyper novelty can disrupt the signals that your body relies on, negatively impacting gut, immune and overall health. ARMRA Colostrum works at the cellular level to boost, to bolster, boost, either way works, your health from within. Colostrum is nature's first whole food, helping to strengthen gut and immune health and fuel performance. 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As the season heats up, Caraway makes it easy and fun to make cocktails on the patio. And Caraway makes it a breeze to organize your kitchen, creating clutter free kitchen that creates calm. No, that creates calm. Pause. Just the right conditions for a brilliant and creative meal or a quick one pot meal that is nutritious and delicious. I think I may have just dropped a word in there. You dropped a word. I feel like there's a word missing. I may have just read right past it. That happens too. So we'll go back at the end of the podcast and... No, we won't. Don't make promises. You're not going to keep... I will go back at the end of the podcast and figure out whether I blazed past a word. Caraway is awesome. It is awesome. Regardless of whether or not I dropped a word in the script. It's awesome whether you're spending time at the grill, the stove or the oven. Caraway has the gear for you. Roast chicken in Caraway's cookware, throw together a salad in their new mixing bowl set or bake a seasonal berry crisp in their bakeware. Yum. With Caraway, all of this deliciousness from roasting to baking, from a quick omelet cooked on the stove top to a long simmered soup is easy to accomplish. Caraway's cookware and bakeware is functional, beautiful, non-toxic and easy to clean. What's more... no, what's more? How about what more could you want? Caraway kitchenware is crafted with sustainable non-toxic materials like FSC certified birchwood, premium stainless steel enameled cast iron and naturally slick ceramic. And Caraway makes several lines of non-toxic cookware and bakeware. Our favorites are their stainless steel line and their enameled cast iron. All of Caraway's products are free from forever chemicals and their enameled cast iron is offered in six stylish and beautiful colors. These pots are strong and highly scratch resistant, the last generations. Caraway also offers butcher blocks to cut on, glass lids for non-toxic cooking with a view and a whole range of other accessories too. We're cooking with Caraway and this past year, Zack, our elder son, did two in his first college apartment. He says it's amazing, which we know to be true and we know that he will be cooking with it for a long time to come. Right now you can save up to $230 on the 12 piece cookware stet... Stet, no. Set. Versus buying the products individually. If you spend over $495 you'll receive a butcher block free. Plus if you spend over $795 you can get a free cast iron grill pan. Visit carawayhome.com slash DH10 to take an additional 10% off your next purchase. This deal is exclusive for our listeners. So visit carawayhome.com slash DH10 or use the code DH10 at checkout. Very good. Someday we're going to take a tour through some of what is happening in the West. One of the themes being the West is on fire, which we'll start with some literal examples, both historic and present. We've been talking a bit about soccer and then, hey y'all, it's pride month. Yeah, we're going to go there. Feeling it. Yeah, a little. You know, all right. I don't. I have never, and I'm so grateful for this, felt that you were feeling pride month. No. You know, there was a time when it just, I mean, there was a time when it wasn't a month. Am I right about that? Absolutely. I mean, this is one of the things I did not look into. Who gets to decide and how is it that all you have to do is say pride month and everyone's like, oh, I know it's not like, but how? Why? A whole month? That's like 12th of the calendar. Yes. There was a moment when I went through a number of people were going through and I went through and like counted up all of the days, you know, trans remembrance day, trans identity, like so many, so, so much of the calendar year and who gets to decide? I don't know that, but yeah, whole month. It wasn't a thing when we were growing up. So it became a thing. Who knows how? And when I said this to our sons, 20 and 22 year old sons that I had seen this thing about pride month, one of them, I don't actually remember which one of them said, oh, is that still a thing? That's like, that's the perfect response. I kind of thought we did, you know, peak pride, peak trans, peak queer, we were there, we got through it and we were hopefully going to start helping the many people who got confused and tricked and starting to place blame on the people who were doing the confusing and tricking and actually hold people accountable. But I don't know if that's actually happening. I think it's going to be a slow wane as opposed to a precipitous drop off with, with actually acknowledgement of many of the harms that have been caused. Well to your point about what happens to it. I mean, that is one of the things that's frustrating about it is a pride is clearly a, a fraught concept because there's good pride and then there's also the sin and there's a reason that it's a sin, which is that it's a problematic phenomenon. But you know, originally it was like, I don't know if it was a day, but it was like gay people welcome. And then it became expanded and the point, and then it not only did it become expanded in terms of who, but it also became expanded in terms of how long. And I don't, I literally think there's no way you could unmake it because the point is that would be taken as an aggressive act. So let's, this is, this is going to be the last story that we do before we talk about what the West is. So let's, let's, let's get back to this because we, we sort of led with the West is burning and I don't see any evidence at the moment that there is literal fires around pride month. Not yet. We'll see. But okay. So last week we talked a lot about the mayoral race in Los Angeles, the first election of which was yesterday, June 2nd, June 2nd. Yes. So in January of 2025, let's go back a little farther back now, 16 months ago, our hometown of Los Angeles experienced two extraordinary fires, including the Palisades where I grew up. The images of those fires and the clearly incompetent response to those fires have seared themselves into memory for many of us. And Angelina is both past and present have, have said, and I think it's, it's hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to understand this, that it's, it's nearly impossible to imagine that LA will fully recover from those fires. And you know, I know much more about the one on the West side in the Palisades than the Eaton fire in Altadena, but they were simultaneous and devastating. And as we talked about last week, the response from current mayor and incumbent mayor, Karen Bass was beyond incompetent, you know, clear, you know, clear, clearly evocative of corruption, at least whether or not it recovers. I think it's clear it will never be the same. Yeah. Even if it comes back in some way. Yes, indeed. So Karen Bass, the incumbent, who is being challenged by Spencer Pratt, who is a native Angelina, as I believe Karen Bass is. And Spencer, Spencer Pratt, like I grew up in the Palisades, and he had his home burned down on the fires, his home with his family and also his parents' home burned down on the fires. And he has become appropriately outraged and energized by the failures of government in his beloved hometown. And so he is now running for mayor along with, and we showed a clip from the debate last week, the three top contenders are incumbent Karen Bass and Spencer Pratt, and then also Councilwoman Nithya Raman. So yesterday's election is some people voted in person, but a lot of people mailed in votes. We got about 63% reporting now. It's called the top two primary. It's a weird thing that California does. And the same thing is true for the governor's race, which is also an interesting thing that we will talk about at some point in California before the November election. A top two primary means that if someone gets more than 50% of the vote, they win the office and there is no general election. That effectively worked as the general election. But if nobody wins over 50% of the vote, sorry, the top two vote getters, regardless of party, go to the general election in November. So can we show the KTLA link, the first link I showed you, which as of 8am this morning was showing, no, if you go farther down, we have 63% as of, wow, unless that is current, which is, can you actually, let me just see it. As of 8am this morning, we had 63% reporting. So they've, that's interesting. I've got a screenshot that I will show you guys from this morning that shows 63% reporting. And now it's saying 60% reporting. What is that? Well, everybody's heard of a recount. I think this is a decount. Decount. Okay. So this is the screenshot that I took. Can you see my screen? But at 8am this morning, I'm glad I took the screenshot. So I don't know. I don't know what that's about. The numbers are similar. If you can go back to what is what they're currently saying nearly four hours later is the current vote. Can you show us the, so yeah, there's numbers. It seems like the numbers are the same, but they're saying 60% reporting versus 63% reporting. The numbers are identical because I'm looking at my screenshot from this morning. I don't know what that is about. I would, I did not, I did not expect that. Well, one conceivable interpretation is that they don't know how many absentee ballots or mail-in ballots there are going to be. And so sure. But are they getting a, are they getting a count on the denominator without knowing what the actual votes are? Like are they just counting ballots before they count who voted for whom? Is that plausible? It's certainly conceivable. I don't know. It's interesting. Yeah. Okay. So put that aside because I did not see that coming. But the numbers remain identical to what they were about four hours ago, which has Bass getting 34.8% of the vote, which is enough given how many precincts are reporting for her who have been called as one of the winners, one of the people who will go into the general. But there's also enough votes in that it will clearly be a runoff and will go to a general. And Spencer Pratt with 30.4% of the vote and then Ramon with 22.3% of the vote, which seems pretty clear and hopeful that Pratt is going to go on to be running against Bass in the general election. So that's just a bit of a recap with today's new information from yesterday's election for the mayoral race in LA, which we talked about. But one thing we didn't talk about last week at all were the race dynamics in this race, which just I guess anyone who watched last week and saw the debate will have noted that Karen Bass and Nithya Raman are both women of color. It's how we're supposed to say this now. Karen Bass is African American and Nithya Raman is a South Asian woman. She's Indian. She immigrated to the US at the age of six to Louisiana, got some advanced degrees from Harvard and MIT and moved to LA in 2013, all of which is not particularly here nor there except she has not been in LA all that long. You don't need to be a native Angelina or a native of the country to run for mayor. But you may remember that one of the things we showed her saying last week in the debate was the city that she loves bears no resemblance to the one that Spencer Pratt is talking about. And I'm sorry, Spencer Pratt is speaking reality about what he and so many other Angelinos are seeing on the streets, having 40 plus years of experience in the city that he was born and raised in and loves and has not left. And Spencer Pratt's a white guy. So time was not too long ago when those simple demographic immutable markers would have been sufficient to mean that Pratt had no chance because the extremely liberal voter base of Los Angeles had been hoodwinked into believing that the only honorable thing to do when you were voting is to not vote your conscience, not vote for the issues, but vote for the person with the greatest number of things on the progressive stack, things, characters, whatever. You know, if if you have a, you know, a handicapped trans woman, I won't even use that word trans, you know, male identifying, female identifying women of color. That person trumps the person who only is merely gay, for instance. Right. So there are these racial dynamics that as far as I've seen in this election, no one has been playing up, which is which tells us something about Bass and Raman reading the room at some level and realizing that's not going to play anymore. So I want to zoom out a little bit and just point out that the city and the nation were on a much better path with respect to racial dynamics. And it just so happens that in this case, we've gone into a kind of insanity surrounding race having come from a place in which bigotry had not completely vanished, but had largely vanished. A lot of ignorance persists. But I remember when we were kids, the mayor was Tom Bradley. Tom Bradley was black. I actually met him once. I was a kid and my dad decided we should go trick or treat in Tom Bradley's neighborhood because my dad wanted to meet him and he opened the door and we had a nice chat with him. Anyway, the point is what you dressed us. I have no idea. I think I may have been a space alien, which is not as easy to distinguish from my normal presentation, but leave that aside. In any case, dressed as a space alien, I met Tom Bradley and my dad and him talked for I think it was 15 minutes or something. But anyway, the point is that was a line of trick or treaters behind you piling up. Give us our recess. I think I would have noticed that and it didn't happen. Maybe maybe they were getting candy. They were coming to the door and leaving or something. But anyway, the point is, you know, was racism and a non thing in the late 70s? No. No. But the point is the electorate of L.A. voted for a black guy, not because he was black. They certainly have numerous or several at least white mayors since. It's not like, you know, the reflexive race dynamics had kicked in yet far from it. That was much later. So anyway, it's a weird echo of the evergreen thing, too. Well, actually, I'm reminded of a story that you told me about a friend of yours on the staff at Evergreen who when Evergreen was blowing up nine years ago now, she who knew you well and you knew her, she's I think she was secretary of staff, was defending you to some randos because it was all the rage. Just hate you, hate you, hate you because obviously you were a racist. And I believe maybe you can finish the story for me. You'll remember what I'm talking about. I know exactly. I had forgotten. But yeah, what she said with some sort of shock to this person, this person who was arguing that I was a racist was that seems really unlikely. You know, he grew up in L.A., don't you? Right. I grew up in a big cosmopolitan multiracial city and race dynamics were just different. They were getting better. I remember them getting better. And she was right. And I wouldn't have thought to defend myself that way. No. And it's obviously it's it's not a perfect argument. You know, Rodney King happened after he left L.A., right? Like there there's still plenty, plenty of work to be done. Right. But there was a big cosmopolitan city in which there was there's sprawl rather than up in L.A. because of earthquakes and history. But there are. Yeah. And there. Yes, there are relatively segregated neighborhoods still. But there's also just a lot of intermixing between people of all sorts. Right. Yeah. And I was thinking about this for totally different reasons this morning. You know, you and I were obviously in grade school during the bicentennial, which was a huge deal. Right. We're now 50 years later. The I remember in my grade school, I had two black friends in my friend group of, you know, maybe it was eight or nine people. But it was it was not even a thing. Right. It was remarkable that that was the fact. And anyway, we've so we've made so much reverse progress by emphasizing race and turning it into a sacred parameter rather than a complexifying parameter. It is complexifying, but it is not simple in this way. So just back to the evergreen thing. So people catch the connection. Yeah. Evergreen evergreen went mad publicly starting May 23rd, 2017, nine years ago. It went mad under a white president. And many will remember the famous piece of video in which one of the protesters who became rioters was challenging the president saying that the entire administration was white and that that was systematic as fuck was his term. Well, in fact, the prior president who had just retired making room for George Bridges, who drove the place insane, was the longest standing president of the college. And he was black. His name was Les Purse. And so the point is even evergreen had been just simply not crazy on this front and then went crazy. And it was it was bubbling up, right? Like, you know, Black Lives Matter, which is another case, as you have pointed out of the label, on the box not being what is inside the box. Black Lives Matter was existed long before 2020 when it came to the attention of a lot of people after George Floyd died. But we were seeing posters in off in faculty windows, office windows that looked out on a kid, you know, Red Square. The quad had evergreen was called Red Square that said Black Lives Matter back in, I want to say like 2014, 2015. And so there were the tensions, the desire for activists, activist faculty, creating activist students, because it mostly really was coming top down, at least on campuses and certainly at Evergreen, where we were, was being thwarted and stopped by the fact that we had a strong, kind, but stern president who was also black. And so he could just shut it down and no one could accuse him of being racist. He was like, look at me, man. Like, I hope he never actually had to do that. But he was just like he didn't put up with shit. And that particular line of argument that the activists used, which is you basically have no standing if you aren't the right color. That's the progressive stack could not possibly work on him. And so he didn't hopefully even have to work very hard to keep it down. But then as soon as the new dipshit president in town, George Bridges, came in, he was he was either immediately captured or the point was that he would lead Evergreen. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what happened. But, you know, I guess the point is if you know, it's it's it's rather like the climate science stuff. Like there are places you can start the clock that it looks like you've got this precipitous warming, but you've chosen the place to start the clock. You know, if you start the clock on L.A. You know, in 1973, then it looks like L.A. was doing actually pretty good on race dynamics and that that was not a central player because, you know, it wasn't like resources had found themselves divided equally. But, you know, it'd be pretty hard to be, you know, an overt racist in L.A. because, well, it's not where people found themselves. Except check out this next video. All right. Are you voting for it? It's Yiraman. Why her over bath? Well, she's Indian and I'm South Asian. So what do you think about Spencer Pratt? Not much. Do you think he has a chance? I don't know. Do you? I mean, if people are willing to like Trump, some people just want to vote for the white guy. That's true. Just because they're white. That's unfortunate. What do you think about that? People voting on like the base on like race and stuff? I think it's a kind of unfortunate because you should be looking at someone's credentials, really. So that's making the rounds. Yeah. I don't know who to either the people are. It's clearly been edited. But the guy on the left, the South Asian guy on the left clearly said what he said. Yeah. And he clearly feels what he feels. And I don't feel that that's actually uncommon. And so this is in some ways the logic behind like I never I never had dolls. I never played with dolls. But there was a move when we were young to start making dolls look in more various ways so that children playing with dolls could have something that looked like them as opposed to something that looked like the you know, the white ideal of beauty. I thought, oh, OK. Yeah. Right. It can be easier to imagine yourself in a role of either in role play or something that you might aspire to if you have role models that have some demographic features that are more like your own, especially if there have been none before. Right. And so people people do do this. It's not inherently certainly not inherently evil. I think it's a mistake. I think that we should you know, we should try to avoid finding commonality on the basis of immutable characteristics when we can. And, you know, the idea that Raman is his his candidate because they share an ethnicity is not honorable. And the fact that he cannot see the hypocrisy in his position when he says, well, white people certainly shouldn't do that. You should be looking at credentials and I would say no, not credentials, but actual, you know, abilities and and issues and what they say that they're going to do and what they have demonstrated in the past, which is different from credentials because Raman is also constantly talking about her credentials. I read from Harvard and MIT and as we mentioned last week, Pratt has a degree in political science from USC and he doesn't talk about it because that's like it's relevant. It's actually relevant, but that's not what the race is about. Yeah. I don't think that clip is a counterpoint because that clip is modern. And so the point is counterpoint. What? I think I thought you were pointing to that clip as a counterpoint about the centrality of race dynamics. And the thing he says at the beginning of that thing is exactly what I was saying would be unlikely in a place like L.A. And I think the point is, OK, yeah, of course it's likely now because a emphasis, a hyper emphasis on race causes everybody to feel this. But I don't I don't think the beginning position there is inherently modern. I think that people do feel this way somewhat and that this is the basis on which the legitimate basis on which people people from underrepresented communities have felt, you know what, it's hard to get in in the past. It's hard to get in because I'm not seen as a legitimate contender because no one like me who no one who looks like me has ever been in before. So that was a legitimate complaint, not for the last 10 years, maybe not for the last 20 years. Right. In almost any domain at all. But I do believe that there is, you know, it can be difficult to get the initial wedge in. Obviously, this isn't relevant in L.A. politics at this point. It's absurd. Right. It's absurd. I did want to point out I was in the aftermath of Bob Woodson's death, I think last week. Bob Woodson was a civil rights leader, originally a very progressive guy, marched with Martin Luther King, who later in his life became a conservative. And I was looking at a clip of him on Jan Jekielek's program in which he said something that struck me. I mean, we knew him and. Yeah. It's not surprising that this was the position he held, but he said it so cleanly. And it was effectively that he would rather live in a system with overt racism than I think he was talking about. He didn't use the term, but affirmative action. And his point is this is corrosive because it gives you a wrong idea of what you have to do to succeed. And at least overt racism. You know what it is. You know what the rules are. Right. Yeah. And I thought it was just, you know, it was a marvelous to see him articulate this. He was such a bold guy, totally unashamed of his conservatism. And his conservatism was not a lack of concern for the plight of black people in the US. It was about what he thought the best way forward was. And anyway, it was powerful. And I would much rather hear discussions like that than this sort of empty rhetoric about, you know, what lineage you come from. And therefore what it means about who should be elected. Yeah. And I will say I've said this before, but people have asked us what are what are big positions that you've changed your minds on. And the first answer that came to mind when I was first asked that, and I think the one that remains the most obvious is affirmative action that I I. I hadn't thought about it much. This was one of my hopefully relatively few politically held or political opinions that I held without having really thought too deeply about it. It felt like it was the right thing to believe in. And I feel now quite the opposite. Yes. Now, I will say I did think a lot about it when I was younger. I think it sort of came up in debate circles. So anyway, I thought a lot about my position and I was for it. But I was for it based on its original presentation, which involved it being a temporary measure to correct a past injustice and that the whole idea was that if it works, it's not necessary long term. Which means it is it has to be finite, which means and this is where the devil's in the details. You're going to need metrics. You're going to need standards. You're going to need to know what the goal is and when you have met them met it. Yes. And that's that's tough. And that's gameable, presumably. And like what the goal is is going to be disagreed on across many sectors, many constituents. But but you need that else. You end up with an infinite policy that can't possibly continue to do well, because as you can, as you approach anything that might reasonably be regarded as a goal, that very asymptote will be responded to by the activists who are currently on the inside, who are making money off of the thing by redefining what the goal is. Or creating new opportunities for money making from the institution. Yeah, I've now forgotten what the term is for it, but there was something that was discussed in the, you know, back in twenty seventeen, eighteen as, you know, things like evergreen were bringing the woke revolution to people's attention. And one of the the better points I thought was there's this known phenomenon. I think it's known from visual processing, where if you've got some, you know, color that has some blue in it and you start turning down the amount of blue, the sensitivity to blue starts going up so that you will actually see it at the point that it's absent. So if you're making progress against something like racism, there's this tendency to look for it and, you know, oh, microaggressions like, really? I mean, I'm sure something exists that could be defined that way, but you're so sure you can identify a microaggression in somebody's, you know, word choice. You know, the anecdote you're taking it as sacrosanct that you know how to spot the intent of this person. That's not how people and intent work. Right. So as these things, you know, if you look at the mayors of L.A. during our lifetime, blacks are more common than you would expect by their proportion of the population, I believe, if you were to do it by year. I don't know if that's true. Well, you've got at least two. So anyway, the point is, well, there's no indication there that there's a problem in L.A. with voting patterns with respect to race, at least as far as black people go. Right. But the sensitivity to the idea of racism is so high that now it's like a primary consideration in voting for people. And it's very hard to escape because of the toxic dynamics over on the blue team where you can't admit that actually, you know, despite the fact that that person is black, I don't trust them or I don't think they're competent. These are things that are hard to voice. And, you know, that, of course, drives the city insane and gets it lower quality governance than it would otherwise have. Yeah. And even the way that you just phrased that, despite the fact that that person is black, I don't trust them like the priors still have to. Like you have to have to with, of course, I'm likely to trust them because they're black. And that's that's an insane position unto itself. You should either feel that people tend to be trustworthy or people don't tend to be trustworthy. And it's not it's not mostly although there is going to be something there that's not mostly going to be about your skin color. There's going to be stuff around where you live and how you are raised and what your opportunities are and how desperate you are. And all of these things. And, you know, no one is going to be scared of Karen Bass walking down the street like, you know, no one, no one. I don't care how actually racist they might be. She's just not going to be be someone who people are going to cross the street to avoid. Right. I mean, and. And really, it's obvious what the right position is. You should be 100 percent focused on the competence and good intentions of the person you're voting for. And their race should be a non factor. And we've arrived at the inverse place and it's no shock that the city of L.A. Well, no, I don't know that we have arrived in the first place. I think I think, you know, the fact that Pratt is is almost certain to get the second spot in this election and that there has been as far as I can tell, other than this one little clip, no discussion, like even even the only times, which is an insane newspaper like the only times has become the West Coast. New York Times like they're doing a disgusting job of or they have. And I actually have not looked at what how they covered today. But in the run up to this race, they were to this election. They were being quite despicable towards Pratt and absurdly fawning towards both Bass and Raman. I want to I want to defend my my statement. I believe we had arrived close to a place where it didn't matter. And then we arrived later at a place where nothing mattered more and that we have now crossed over and we're headed back in this direction, which is. As much as it's interesting that this is happening in L.A., this is also indicating something about the national mood and the fact that not only it did Pratt win a very surprising percentage of the vote in light of the fact that these racial dynamics have been so influential of late, but also the theme that I think we highlighted last week where people are finding the ability to admit that they are taking him seriously, considering voting for him. That thing is dawning. And I saw I saw a clip in which I saw several clips in which prominent people were also doing what average folks are doing. And yeah, the the creator of Entourage has been has been doing several videos talking about what's actually happened in L.A. Oh, I didn't catch that. I caught Adam Carolla and Kelsey Grammer. Oh, that's surprising. So I'm cool. I'm not surprised by it because it's his. He's been he's been a conservative. But also like that's what he does is speak out about current events like that's yeah, that's his job. And I saw a weird clip with Bill Maher where Bill Maher came part of the way and he said something along the lines of, you know, I interviewed Spencer Pratt and I'm supposed to hate him, but I don't. And it was like, hi, I wonder why you would go that far. He's obviously more competent than Karen Bass. So I can't imagine why Bill Maher would be held back from just saying, you know what, in this case, L.A. is in terrible shape. I think it's worth giving him a shot. But anyway, the spell is breaking is the point. The spell is breaking at least. And if it breaks in Hollywood, it breaks among the Hollywood elite things, things probably will change. Yeah, because that's that is to a large degree who runs the town. Yep. OK, so that's those fires in L.A. from the beginning of twenty twenty five are the are the the West is burning piece from that story. Now let's go to Paris and talk about what happened on Sunday. Excuse me. After in Budapest, not in Paris, but in Budapest, you had PSG, the French soccer team, beating Arsenal from London in the Champions League, which is a big soccer tournament. Yeah, you could tell like I was not paying much attention to it. We don't really watch soccer. It's a great game. Understood. But this is a big win. And in Budapest, everything was great. Meanwhile, in Paris, where the winning team was from, we we see this show this video from Mario Nafal. That looks like fire. Yeah. And so we were talking over this rather than having sound. OK, what's that? Also, but we can't get no. We're good to talk. OK, so I guess I don't I really know what to say to it. This was happening in Paris on Sunday after the win of the French soccer team. And it made me wonder, because it's hard to tell from this video if it's just like standard soccer hooliganism. It's extreme. Obviously, it's really extreme. But my parents, you know, we don't have that kind of response to soccer in the US. But my parents lived in London in the 90s. And I remember my dad talking about some of the soccer hooliganism that would happen after games. And there would be destruction and such. And my first thought looking at this was, is that what this is? Because things have gotten way different. But if you can go down to the tweet. So he posted this. My own novel posted that. And there's a query to that basically asking, who are these people? And what do we attribute this? And there's a number of ways in. But Grock answers. This way to can you scroll up and show just what the question was. Can we see that? Why are citizens of Paris destroying their own city, even when they won the game? What will be the most I don't know what this language is, but what would be the most promising reason from sociological, racial and mental aspects? OK, so Grock says the Paris violence after PSG's win follows a repeated pattern in French football celebrations. Car fires, fireworks on police, vandalism and arrests. Sociological, classic deindividuation and excited young male crowd. So that's the hooliganism. That's just like you see that and we shouldn't support it. We shouldn't encourage it. We shouldn't be excited by it. Alcohol, group anonymity and weak deterrence turn celebration into disorder. France has an entrenched hooligan, ultra's element plus opportunists. Budapest stayed calm due to tighter controls and different demographics. Then racial demographic, heavy overrepresentation of North African and sub-Saharan origin youth from banus in arrests and footage. This tracks broader French patterns of elevated youth crime and unrest in high immigration suburbs with parallel norms, low institutional trust and integration failures. Hungary's homogeneity and policies avoid this. And then I'm not sure the last answer matters much. Victory, adrenaline and mob dynamics. It's just hooliganism again. Right. So we do we do have this sort of the ethos of we're excited. We're drunk. The cops probably aren't going to do anything. And we're local fans and we're going to go out and get raucous. And but what I remember from my dad talking about in London in the 90s was, you know, beer bottles being thrown in the street and, you know, fistfights erupting and that sort of thing. Yeah. Not fires and destruction of property and and violence. And the big difference between London in the 90s and Paris now is indeed as Grock reports, and it is not making this up out of whole cloth as many outlets report. The demographics of Paris have fundamentally changed due to strange immigration policies that are related to the thing that has made liberals unwilling to vote for white people in the U.S. for so long. Its policies related to, well, we have to let in our we have to leave our borders open. We have to let in whoever wants to come because it would be mean not to because they have been underserved and underprivileged all this time. So we have to let them come. And it's quite a different thing if the people who want to come are interested in what you have built in becoming part of what you are and making it even more so. And it's quite a different thing if, as the evidence is clear, the people whom you're letting in, who in this case are mostly coming in from North Africa, are simply interested in destroying what exists, in which case, why wouldn't you have a strong border? What could you possibly be thinking? Yeah, I struggle with this every time the immigration question comes up, either in Europe or here. Yes. It is obvious no matter whether you think we need more immigration or not. Right. It is obvious that you should not bring in people who don't like your civilization. Right. That should be the first question we ask. Obviously, people can lie. But we are welcoming people into the West who hate it and want to see it destroyed. And so what I think we're actually seeing there is that if you think about the dynamics that cause looting in an emergency, right, you have a number of police that is capable of maintaining order on an average day or maybe an above average day. But as soon as something calls the attention of all of your emergency services, they are overstretched, which means that the likelihood of being caught and punished for doing something wrong drops. And so I think this results in both the hooliganism, right, which is the product of, you know, joy or exhilaration or something. But once you have that, the point is, oh, well, that is already going to overstretch your police response. So anybody who actually wants to do damage or wants to steal can use it as a kind of cloak. And so I think what we saw is that many of the North Africans who have come to France don't like France and that this gave them an opportunity to do what they felt about their new home country. And that that is that this is nature's way of telling you that you've created a huge problem by bringing in a community that doesn't want to assimilate, doesn't admire you, doesn't even like you and would be just as happy to see you gone. This is what they're going to do given the opportunity. And the point is, OK, well, here, the opportunity arises in the aftermath of a football match. But if you bring in enough of them, it doesn't require it doesn't require that this is a preview of what you're going to get. They're telling you what they think. Yes, yes, they are. And this reminds me, we've talked before about schoolyard dynamics. And, you know, we saw when our kids were very young in the late aughts and early teens, I guess, an elementary school in the early teens, both of them. They were told by well-meaning, always female recess. What's the word? Proctors like the overseers, the Ontarians. There's a word we've both got whatever, whatever the usually volunteer positions who go and stand at recess and just make sure that no one gets hurt is the is the idea is what I always thought those people were doing. And in fact, I don't remember them ever being around when I was in elementary school ever. And I went to a few of them and like never, ever, ever saw any such adult. And, you know, recess should be a time for kids to engage in free play and do whatever the hell they want, so long as no one's getting hurt. But both of our kids reported when they were in elementary school that having started some game that they were told that X needed to be included. You know, dude over here because because to exclude him was unfair and was mean. You can't say you can't play. You can't say you can't play. Exclusion is bad. Don't we all know that, kids? And so our boys would come home saying is exclusion bad? Can't I have a game with rules that like like not everyone in the world can play like we have like I have. Don't I get to have a border? Don't I get to decide I want to play with this group of friends? And frankly, so much of what has happened like we when I was growing up, I was hearing a lot for as a young woman about bodily autonomy and about the borders and about always being able to say no hands like keep the fuck away from me. Sorry. But like, you know, keep away from me. These my my body, my border, you don't get to be here. And somehow almost all the all the borders, including that one over in trans space, have been completely destroyed, completely obliterated. And now all we are supposed to care about is whether you look like a good enough person who doesn't have any hate in your heart and therefore is willing to let in everyone, including the criminals and psychopaths. And that's not OK. The criminals and psychopaths, which their home countries have an incentive to offload because, of course, their governance issue gets better if they take the worst of the worst and shove them out the door. So there's a certain amount of that. But I wanted to point to the irony of the I think well intentioned. You can't say you can't play. You know, there are bullies. I don't think I've ever actually ever heard that. You never heard that? No. Oh, I think you blocked it out because it was everywhere for a while. But well, our boys lived it, but I don't think they don't. They weren't reporting that phrase. But anyway, you can't say you can't play. You can't say you can't play. We all understand that there are bullies and mean girls and this thing. And it's not desirable. Right. We don't really want civilization to be run by these people. And so the impulse to say, oh, that that thing is illegal to begin with. You're not going to be allowed to do that. It's you know, it's against the rules may be well intentioned at the start. However, the the purpose of childhood, the evolutionary purpose of childhood, which in humans is longer than in any other creature that has ever existed. The reason for that is so that you can learn the very dynamics that you will need in adulthood in a safer microcosm where you're not trying to navigate these rules with adults. You're navigating them with your peers. If you make a rule from on high, you can't say you can't play. Then the kids never figure out how to deal with the bully who wants to exclude them, how to ingratiate yourself to a group of people so that they will want to play with you. They don't learn the essential skills of being an adult on the playground the way they're supposed to. And I'm not saying it was ever nice. They also don't learn how to create good systems, because in both of our boys cases, what I heard was, yeah, you know, me and five of my friends are, you know, nine other random people on the playground, but it needed to be even teams. And we had we needed five against five had created this game. But then when we were told we had to include everyone, the game doesn't make sense. So we just stopped. Yeah, like we don't know if it was going to work. We thought it was going to be cool, but we don't know. We weren't allowed to test it. We weren't allowed to play. Right. So you can't say you can't play well, then. Like if if if your game can't accommodate absolutely everyone, then no one can play. And I heard this with regard to honestly, and I've said this before, too, study abroad in the Amazon. I was told by some presumably well intentioned but completely idiotic college administrator, not an evergreen at a different college, when I described to her the situation of leading study abroad trips in remote places in Ecuador, including the Amazon, and proposed to her the hypothetical that a student in a wheelchair wanted to be in my program, which included about half the year on campus and half the year in the Amazon. And my point or in Ecuador, rather, and my my position to her was if this person was really, really interested in the on campus work, that it's possible that I would make an exception and create a separate curriculum for when the rest of us were in Ecuador. Person says, well, why can't they just go like, you know, do you want to see them skeletonized in the Amazon by insect? Like, it's hard enough walking in was a very fit person in a rubber boots in the muck of the Amazon, I assure you, you can't get through there and it will share. And this idiot title line officer at a college that I will not name said to me, then you can't run the trip at all. So that's this logic. That's this logic in every place. If you can't include everyone, then you can't have what you want. You can't have what you earned. You can't have what you deserved. You can't have L.A. anymore, because if you're not interested in human feces in the streets and Fint zombies doing the Fint hang outside your door, then that's on you because you're a big meanie. You know, this played out in another place. I can't remember exactly how long ago would have been, I think at least 30 years ago. But there was this amazing story that I thought captured the game theory of this so so beautifully. I think I saw a 60 Minutes report. 60 Minutes Once Upon a Time was a journalistic program. It's now. I remember that. Yeah. But they did a program on an invention which was a public toilet, completely stainless steel on the inside that completely cleaned itself no matter what had happened in it in between uses. And they demonstrated this thing on 60 Minutes and it was a marvel. Right. And you would think, oh, my goodness, this is such a great upgrade to a city to have a public toilet. You don't have to walk into it with, you know, trepidation about what has happened there. And because it could not be made to accommodate people in wheelchairs, it was decided that it was not allowed to exist. And so the answer was, well, then the only answer is gross toilets are none at all, rather than this amazing invention that had solved the problem, but not for absolutely every person. And it's like, what kind of insanity is this where effectively it's Harrison Bergeron. Yeah, it's Harrison Bergeron. Harrison Bergeron. It's the Vonnegut short story about having having to reduce standards to such a level that everyone has become idiot fied, which I have to say again, in this tension between the improving state of race relations and the insanity of woke madness, I will remind people of a story I've told before. As evergreen began melting down, and it was largely melting down around me, all of our students, all the students that we knew stood bias. One of my students who was in the current class, the one that was disrupted so publicly on video, a young black woman, as the thing is melting down, and I am talking to my students about what it means and what the heck we're going to do. She kept coming up to me and I think she literally was tugging on my shirt. She was quiet. She was like, "You have to read this story. Harrison Bergeron." I hadn't heard of it."You have to read this story." I'm like, "Do you see what's going on? I don't have time to read it." She's like, "No, it's not the time for fiction.""You have to read the story." And I finally did read the story and it was like, "Oh my God, I had to read the story." I mean, it was so central to the thing. But yeah, the idea that you get veto power over a public good because it can't include absolutely everybody. You get to veto a trip to the Amazon. You get to veto clean public toilets because it's impossible to include everyone. Therefore, nobody should. It's taking your ball and going home effectively. And it may not even, in the case of the public toilets, I don't know that it was people in wheelchairs who demanded that they not be deployed. It was people trying to do right by the people in the wheelchairs who did wrong by every other person. Yes. This was not slated on the docket, but you reminded me of this, if you can show my screen."The glass is already being broken out on the new Throne Labs Smart Portable restrooms in Seattle, Washington. These bathrooms were installed just two weeks ago and are already unusable because the windows are broken out. Cost of taxpayers is$116,000 per year per bathroom. Seattle installed them as part of a one-year pilot program with the Seattle Department of Transportation to support increased foot traffic ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Good segue to our next story here. No one is surprised by this. The only surprise I have is it not always being completely covered in multiple layers of graffiti yet." Okay, so this actually, I just want to lodge this before we go into the next segment here. We have talked frequently about what is the Woke Revolution and why would it be doing what it's doing. My argument has been that this is cryptically an attack on civilization from people who probably correctly understand that they are in a competitive system that is in which they are so damaged by the time they get to adulthood that they couldn't possibly win. So if you're in a system where you're like built to be a loser, your incentive to keep that system running is minimal. And the idea that anybody, I mean we all use toilets, anybody would attack public toilets that they might themselves need is an expression of this hostility to the functioning of society. It's not a complaint about society isn't functioning, it's an attack on the functionality of society because the whole point is we're going to level this. Which we saw in the election, the day after the election, the night of the election in 2020 in Portland when Atifah took to the streets and rioted and set fires. Why? Because Biden won. Wait, what? Didn't you, weren't you, they didn't care. And I remember they had some catchphrases. Oh, I remember vividly. We are ungovernable. We are ungovernable. They just said it out loud. Yep, they said it out loud. Yeah. And that's what we're seeing. Yep. Okay. So in Seattle, as that last video from Twitter showed, the FIFA World Cup is coming. This is soccer's big every four year championship FIFA, the Federation International, the Football Association was founded in 1904. It turns out like this is an old organization. I just, I have not been paying any attention to this, but I looked into it a little bit. It was founded in 1904 and is the governing body for football, which we heathens here in the United States call soccer. I think the entire rest of the world calls it football, right? Yes. Yeah. And what we call football has not very much to do with You've all seen the comedy routine. The SNL. There's a little kick. So FIFA began in 1904 in Paris and the World Cup, they began running the World Cup in 1930. And it's been uninterrupted every four years, ever since. And the World Cup in 2026 is going to be the largest by far with games held between June 11th and July 19th in three North American countries, including 11 US cities, three cities in Mexico and two in Canada. So it's not that the World Cup is coming to Seattle, like the World Cup is coming to Seattle. It's going to be six games played in Seattle, but the World Cup is coming to a lot of places in North America. And the first game in Seattle is going to be on June 15th, the last in early July. But Seattle, as we've talked about a lot, like all the West Coast cities and a different way from many of the European cities, as we showed what was going on in Paris last weekend, Seattle is a mess. It's just a mess. We just showed you the portable toilets or the portable, municipal public. Thank you. There it is. Whose glass have been blasted out within two weeks of them being put up specifically to accommodate the crowds that will come in for the World Cup, which should be a good thing, right? Like having people come in for a big event for which the infrastructure is built should just be seen as a good thing, even if it's an inconvenience at the time. Six games, a lot of people spending a lot of money on hotels or Airbnb is that still is flowing into the city. If the Airbnb is a locally owned restaurants, food, services, all of this, right? It should be a good thing for the city. Except that Seattle, like I said, is a mess. And like all the West Coast cities has this incredible problem with homelessness, which is Spencer Pratt's main issue that he's running on in the mayoral race. Portland, we've talked about a lot. San Francisco has a problem. Seattle's a problem. So what to do? What to do about the homelessness? Well, there's a lot of rumors out there. Apparently the sheriff of Moses Lake, Washington, remember Moses Lake out by Sun Lakes, out by Dry Falls is on record saying like, yeah, there's rumors that all the homelessness from all the homeless people from Seattle being shipped here. We don't see any of that yet. So like, we'll keep you posted. Moses Lake is not a big place. I think they'd notice. So I don't think almost people are being shipped to Moses Lake. But there's also more compelling evidence that the homeless encampments in Tacoma have recently gotten a lot more crowded. I buy that. I think that's plausible. I don't think it's honorable. I think you might work on figuring out how to solve the problem as opposed to shipping people away to make them invisible when the tourists come to town. But I don't know for sure. But what is definitely happening is this next post-millennial link, Seattle builds tiny home village for cities homeless drug users displaced by the FIFA World Cup games. And let's scroll down a little bit here. And I'll just read a little bit of it. Seattle is in the process of building a tiny home village intended to house the city's homeless population ahead of the FIFA World Cup coming to the Emerald City on June 15. Andrea Suarez of We Heart Seattle said that the Bayview Pallet Shelter village located near 15th and on railway is being operated by Everyone Deserves Housing. That's an alarm bell right there. The name of the organization is Everyone Deserves Housing. That sounds so awesome. Doesn't everyone deserve housing? But we know now that if that is your mission, that what you're trying to do is only like the only thing that you can see about what is wrong with the situation and these people's problems is that they don't have shelter. And that is not the only thing wrong. So people moving in here will be the people most highly affected by FIFA World Cup or displaced by World Cup. And the housing village will be low barrier, which means drug users will be allowed access and the facility is set to open on June 8. The low barrier part of it is the key thing. That means that you don't have to change anything about what you're doing, what you're using, whether or not you're on fentanyl or anything else, you are welcome if there's 500, I think, of them. And of course, Mayor Wilson is catching heat from all sides, as you know, probably she should, because she's not good at what she does. But the, you know, there's a lot of people who say this should also include drug rehabs like, well, we're just trying to shelter people. Why do you just suddenly need to shelter people for the short term? Oh, because you need to get them off the streets. So the hordes of tourists aren't stepping over, you know, human feces and walking past vent zombies and wondering if they're still alive. All right. A couple of things I want to point out. One, as I didn't know about this encampment that's being built, as you're beginning to describe it, I was thinking, well, there's an obvious question. If you don't allow drugs, you're not going to get the residents. If you do allow drugs, what have you created? Well, low barrier you've created. You remember "Hamster Down"? From "The Wire." The "The Wire" explored this concept in a very excellent season in which some renegades lower down in the city hierarchy, sick and tired of not having the resources or the ability to deal with the drug crime, basically the war between drug cartels in Baltimore, created a zone in which they would not police the selling and using of drugs in order to corral it to one part of the city so it didn't affect other parts of the city. So anyway, "The Wire" obviously fictional, but based on David Simon's reporting for the Baltimore Sun, so based on real ideas, explored this question. But in this case, I wouldn't advise them not to allow drugs, but you obviously have a different problem once you do, which is that you've effectively sanctioned this even more than you do currently. And so obviously, the one thing we can't do is get to the bottom of why this is happening, and you must. But I want to point out the ultra... So you've got a game theory problem over in "What's your drug policy in the place where you hope that the homeless people will go?" There's an alternative part of the game theory, which is actually raised by Spencer Pratt. So Spencer Pratt did an interview in which he said something that many people misreported as him saying he was going to send L.A.'s drug addicts to Seattle, because not what he said. What he said was something akin to,"They'll want to go because of what I'm going to do here in L.A." And I would just point out that this is part of the collective action problem involved in homeless drug addicts, really any kind of vagrant problem. And you'll remember, there was a chapter in which Rudy Giuliani took a violent, lawless New York City and actually did clean it up. Did he know something special about these people or how to fix them? No. What he knew is what they knew in the Wild West. If you don't want people around, you make them miserable, right? You do things like you tell them that you can't loiter and then you harass them for loitering until they decide to move somewhere that's nicer to them, right? This is any city, it makes sense not to create the most hospitable place on earth for drug addicts, because what's that going to do? Well, it's going to attract them from everywhere, right? Where are they not going to go? To the places that are inhospitable, whether the places that are inhospitable are being fair or not, right? So the point is, in some sense, if your job is to govern CityX, the obvious right thing to do from the point of view of your population is to make life as hard on the people that you don't know what to do with as possible so they go away. So, you know, in the 70s, what this looked like, skateboarding is not a crime, was a response to those little metal brackets being put on any continuous concrete thing that could otherwise be skated. I don't know any of the terms in skateboarding, but I used to watch these guys a lot. They're amazing, right? And like those brackets stopped the skateboarding in public spaces in a way that was apparently disruptive to people some of the time, maybe. That was so much less disruptive than what is going on in cities now. Like wouldn't we love to see interventions to stop, to corral people into not being publicly debauched and depraved and drug-addled? And you know what? Let's let people engage in parkour and skateboarding and, you know, actually engage in physical stuff in the city with their own bodies and, you know, be aware of the people around them who are not engaged in those things and, you know, not have them running over people who are just walking. But like this is how we actually engage with each other, not by stopping the young guys mostly who are actually trying to have a good time and exploring the limits of their own physicality, but encouraging literally the people who've given up on themselves and are taking it out of society. We've just stopped expecting that anyone is responsible with their own actions. Well, in that case, you have another option, which we've seen, which is the building of super rad skate parks, right? So that the... Yeah, but then you mean, yes, true. But the point is, you know, you make it a little bit difficult where you don't want people, you know, knocking over pedestrians and you make it pretty cool. Some other place where they're only dealing with each other, that kind of works at the... That doesn't work for drugs though. No, that's the point. And here's the problem we now got. My argument has been, unfortunately, because it pays the government of any city to make life hard on the people that you don't know what to do with to drive them to other cities, you can't solve this at that level. You can't solve it at the state level. You could solve it at the federal level, right? The federal level could apply policies that work so that they didn't have an incentive to just move and make somebody else's life miserable, but that there was actually an incentive to get yourself clean, or if you're not going to get yourself clean, to stay out of the way of civilization, etc. But the problem is, the folks who did not encourage this have an absolute right to not want to pay for the consequences of all of the absurd people who decided that the right way to deal with drug addicts was to give them paraphernalia, right? So you now have an unresolvable problem, because you would have to have a national policy in order not to just drive them around the map, but now you can't have a national policy because the people who didn't do this to themselves have every reason not to want to deal with the much larger problem that's now been created. They have a completely understandable sense that, yeah, well, Seattle, congratulations, you got what you asked for. Yep. I guess I will say that the governors of the three West Coast states, I want to say maybe Hawaii and Alaska are involved too, although that seems a little odd, but there's a COVID public health coalition in these three states, which is, of course, actually counter to what they claim it is. They're actually in, they're doing all the wrong things. But the governors were able to come together for the stated interest in enhancing public health. The West Coast being a destination for homeless people because the climate even up in Seattle is mild year round with, you know, a few days, weeks here and there that make it really, really not okay to be outside. I do feel like if those three governors actually grow up and developed a plan that the West Coast homeless issues could begin to resolve, that I'm not sure it would actually take the entire federal government. Yes. Well, as a traumatized liberal, I trust these people about as far as I can throw them. I don't think they're well intentioned and I can't imagine them doing a good job of that. But yes, if you could fiat people who actually were capable and had an interest in making life better for the citizens, yeah, then something, the more federated the response, the more likely it is to not just drive them to some municipality that isn't minding the store. That's probably true. And looks like the runoff for governors race in California is going to be at the moment or when I checked at 8am, the Republican, the main Republican was actually in the lead. I have not looked into either him or the, excuse me, his main Democratic contender. But my feeling is at this point, more Democrats in California is not. Right. And I would also just say, the Spencer Pratt thing is so important because if the spell is breaking in Los Angeles, that tells you something about the national mood. And maybe it's a moment at which, you know, we can have a new sheriff in town, which is what we need at a scale much larger than cities. Yeah. Okay. I mentioned the progressive stack a few times. And we know what, what better indicator of the absurdity than what has happened to what was once just the gay community, LGB, and has now become Alphabet Soup. And it is, as I said, pride month. And as a UC Santa Cruz alum, I got an email announcing pride month. If you would start by showing this email. This pride month, we invite you to celebrate and support the community fostered by the Lionel Cantu Queer Center at UC Santa Cruz named in honor of activist and scholar Lionel Cantu Jr. The center continues to uplift and celebrate queer and trans communities on campus through meaningful programming, leadership opportunities, and culturally framing spaces. Let's just go down a bit. Yeah, there we go. So there's a few things. There's a food pantry. There's queers giving, but there's also the gender affirming closet, which provides free clothing and accessories such as binders, bra inserts, and trans tape that help students express their authentic selves with confidence. Let's go to the queer, the next, the next link. And we're going to just go go through them. Okay, so here's the actual queer center on campus with the banana slug holding a pride flag, a cozy space for queer connection, mission and vision. The Lionel Cantu Queer Resource Center co creates experiences with and for students, staff, and faculty to challenge cis heteronormative understanding of gender and sexuality. We build a more inclusive campus community by providing resources, care, advocacy, and education that disrupts binaries, Bret, and honors the intersecting realities and dynamics within gender and sexual diversities. We envision communities where people of all genders and sexualities are able to thrive and celebrate their whole personhood. And they encourage you to visit the Cantu cabin, the all gender restroom locations, and explore the Cantu clothing closet. Let's go to the Cantu clothing closet. This is going to be the gender affirming gear closet, where it's a dedicated resource. Again, the gag. Yeah, believe it or not, the gag closet, the gender affirming gear closet, they really have no one sane watching what they're doing at all. The gag closet is a dedicated resource at the Cantu Queer Resource Center designated to support UCSC students in affirming their gender with comfort, confidence, and dignity. We understand that access to gender affirming items can be essential for many students' well-being and self-expression. The gag closet offers a range of free gear to help you feel your best every day. Let's see what's available at the gag closet. Yeah, let's see. Shall we? Well, there is gaffes, which is tucking underwear, an archaic term originally used by drag queens, apparently, bras and bra insides. Wait, wait, tucking underwear? We'll get there. Okay. Yeah. Binders. Like notebooks? I wish. Packers. I don't want to know. To make it look like you have balls and a penis? Yeah. Binders and so bras and bras. Even what context is that? So we'll get to tucking underwear because that's in the tucking kits and we're going to go to a whole dedicated page of that. But bras and bra inserts to make it look like you have boos if you don't. Binders to make it look like you don't have boobs if you do. Packers to make it look like you have male genitalia if you don't. Stand to pee devices, which is actually something that women use in the back country, right? So you don't have to squat. I always just squat. But okay, so this is so that you can appear from the back like you're a dude if you're not a dude, I guess. Trans tape and accessories. This is actually in lieu of binders. It is instead of having an entire high pressure cloth wrapped around your chest to obscure the fact that you have boobs. You put on trans tape and of course taking them off might be painful so you wear nipple guards and have removal oil to get the adhesive off of you. And then tucking kits. Now I went and looked at tucking kits. Let's go to the next link here. This is an outside purveyor of tucking kits at a place called Unclockable. This site is called Unclockable. Can we make that a little bit bigger so I can read some of what it says? And if not, I can link through onto mine. So just note that the site Unclockable is a reference to how can you a dude present sufficiently as a woman in public situations such that you are not clocked, such that you don't get clocked, such that no one can tell. And of course, many of us are like, yeah, we can tell. Like do what you want, but we can still tell because you don't change your skeleton. You don't like you. We can still tell. So the tuck kit. This is the second one. There are others. Invisible all day comfort and security gain pain free tucking piece of mind made in an FDA registered facility. Unclockable tuck kit two features a patented design that provides zero bulge benefits worn under your favorite leggings, jeans, tight dresses and skirts, bikinis, or even lace lingerie. Ultra breathable and sensitive skin friendly cotton rayon blend tea tape and 40% larger nonstick cotton pad keep you clean, comfortable and confidently tucked for up to 12 hours. Swim proof, gym proof, life proof. So especially for young men, the testes can apparently still be inserted back into the inguinal canals from which they descended. That can't be safe. Can't be comfortable. But that's still there's still the problem. The problem. If what you're trying to do is present to the world as a woman when you're not the penis. And so that's what the tuck kit is for. And so it gets folded back and tucked and obscured, presenting a smooth interface where there actually is none. This is what we are celebrating this Pride Month. This is what Pride Month is standing for. This is what the gag closet, their name, not mine, the gender affirming gear closet at our alma mater UC Santa Cruz is giving out free, free, where's that money coming from? Free to currently enrolled students and maybe staff and faculty as well. I didn't catch that. So that they can live their what best lives as the sex they are not be delusional. Aren't they in school to get an education? I thought they were in school to get an education not to get an indoctrination, not to enhance their delusions and go forth into the world as cosplaying immature lunatics. I mean, the contrast between the university whose purpose is nominally truth seeking and the delusion fostering here is just so clear. It's one thing to be sensitive to people, to be tolerant of folks experimenting. It is another thing to be fostering outright delusion, especially it's not like, well, you know, you've got the truth seeking part of the university, you know, the departments, and then you've got the fact that you've got to manage a large population that has a million different ways of seeing the world and those things are separate because of course these people are imposing their delusion on the biology department among others, you know, in places that have a medical school, they're imposing it on the medical school. So, you know, it's a coup. It's a coup. As Jonathan Hates said a number of years ago now, the university can prioritize truth or can prioritize, did he say ideology? I don't remember exactly what the alternative was, but, you know, his point was and is correct. You can't do both and the university's job is to seek truth, not to defer to ideology and that's what is being done. And actually analogous to the question about, you can't say you can't play on the playground denying students the developmental environment to build the skills to deal with the difficulty of the adult world. You've got the ideological preventing the exact discussions that are at the heart of a functional university, right? The idea that you should be able to say things that are wrong out there and you should discover it because the argument that comes back is something you can't feel. That's how we get smarter. And so you've got a you've got a university system that has surrendered on the becoming smarter part, which you would think would invalidate the entire project. Yeah. But and it's it's prioritizing people's instantaneous comfort, instantaneous referring to like instantaneous speed as opposed to long term speed. Comfort shouldn't be prioritized regardless. Comfort's nice. I used to spend a lot of time talking to students about comfort in advance of long field trips, especially study abroad trips, what their relationship with it was, what they could expect, where they were going to definitely be forced outside of their comfort zone, how long they might be in a position where they really, really did not feel like they were knowledgeable about where they were and what was going to happen before they were going to get back to a place where they could find themselves, send themselves depending on who they are and how that was done. And you know, just to prepare people because it wasn't going to make sense to take anyone who was going to have a complete meltdown in the middle of, say, the Amazon. But your relationship with comfort is a relationship that you choose. You choose it. You are the agent who is acting in the world and making choices about how you respond to it. And so not only is comfort not the highest and best goal, but instantaneous comfort. How do I feel right now? Right now I'm uncomfortable. Oh, that was a microaggression. Oh, I don't like how that person looked at me. This is an insane metric to be using for anyone. And it does seem to be what the gender affirming gear closet at UCS, the gag closet at University of California Santa Cruz is encouraging. Well, I want to go one step further. There's something here that's new. I'm sure most of it isn't, but discomfort is the mechanism by which you detect that something that you are doing is suboptimal, right? To the extent that the people in the population respond badly to the way you're dressed, to the look on your face, to any of the things about what you're doing. And it results in you sitting alone when you'd rather be talking to somebody or not finding a mate when you'd like to have one or something like that. To the extent that those messages cause you to change and become something that accomplishes the things that you want to accomplish. This is denying that exact mechanism. It's saying, Hey, whatever you are is valid the way you came through the door. And so the point is you're like bending the world to accept it rather than letting the world push you in a direction that you could actually have a life that made sense. It's that and it's also the opposite of that, right? You, we, the world must embrace you, however it is that you have declared at the moment you want to be embraced. But if tomorrow you wake up and you say you're a dog, the world must embrace you in that delusion as well. So the world absolutely must not embrace you. And this is proof of the world's hatred for you and everyone like you. If it says to you, you were born a girl, therefore you are going to become a woman. That is actually true and it is not hateful and confirming and reinforcing and embracing your delusions, especially when they change and they change and they change. And I don't understand how anyone who is an adult, who has lived a life can think that that would result in a mature human being who knows how to make decisions for themselves. I just can't get there. And so I do end up feeling with regard to the trans madness more so than with many of these madnesses that a larger percentage of the people behind them know what they're doing and are actually evil. Like because it is too obvious. It is too obvious. It's so completely obvious that it requires a exotic explanation. Yeah. And I'm not talking about the poor young people who have been fooled. Right. Oh no. So let's divide them into two categories. You've got those who are actually suffering from a delusion. The world says, oh, okay, whatever you've decided you are anywhere in the neighborhood of sex and gender, that is what you are. And we are going to police everybody so that they treat you in that way. Okay. That's the dynamic. Then you get the sociopaths who spot that that is the dynamic. And the point is, are you telling me that I can come up with any garbage, whatever I can be a trans woman with a full on mountain man beard and you're going to force people to call me ma'am. Right. Ah, that sounds like a game I could enjoy. Right. The point is it's a weapon. And by let's assume that there's some well-intentioned thing where you're trying to be inclusive and you recognize that sex and gender is a complicated mess. Okay. Sex and gender is a complicated mess. But as soon as you tell people, hey, don't worry about the mess. We're going to take care of all the people who might have a stray thought about you. Right. And the point is you are in, it's just like the city that's going to hand out the drug paraphernalia to you. You're inviting the bad people. You're telling them, hey, come here. We'll arm you and we'll disarm them. Right. And that's just, it's insane. Right. What, what actually is necessary here is a high signal to noise ratio where as you grow up, I mean, look, we all did dumb shit when we were kids. We all put on things that we should have known better. Right. It, it happens as part of what being young is. Right. There are awkward pictures of each of us with a hairstyle. We shouldn't have had her. Whatever you get the message because what the world reflects back at you after you've done that is not what you like. And so the next haircut isn't that one. Right. You need that signal and it needs to be much louder than the noise in order for you to become something that you're comfortable with later. And so the point is really what you're doing by assuring people that they should be comfortable exactly as they are and that we're going to take care of all of the claims to be. Right. Because again, it's not how they are. Right. Very often. Well, we're going to tell you that and then the abusers will abuse it and the delusional will remain in their delusion. And the point is what you're actually doing is ensuring that the discomfort is lifelong. You're ensuring that they never get anywhere that feels good because they're always going to imagine that it's about the world changing rather than them. And frankly, we've all had to change it just the way it is. Right. No, I mean, this is, I mean, I think this is it's a good way to come to where I wanted us to finish, which is so, you know, the West is burning literally metaphorically. But, you know, what is the West? What are what are the tenets of the West and and why is it worth saving? Yeah, this is this is an interesting one. It's it's pretty hard to make the point to people, especially because you either didn't come from the West and the whole thing is hard to wrap your mind around or you did. And it's like, you know, you know, the fish saying what's water. Right. So what I would argue is that there we have to do some tinkering of the terms. The West obviously has roots in the ancient world. Right. Ancient Rome and ancient Greece have elements that have been carried over into what I would call the modern West. But I'd say the modern West was begun with the founding of the United States, which itself is downstream of the Magna Carta. Right. The Magna Carta gives citizens rights even in a monarchy. The point is the monarch doesn't have absolute power because he needs the population not to revolt. So the idea that citizens have power is important. But the West that we founded by the American founding fathers was a number of things. One of them, which I think was almost accidental in terms of its implication for us in the present, was that they had to get the colonies to agree to confederate. And in order to do that, they needed to tamp down the fears that the many colonists had that the federating structure was going to enable somebody else at their expense. If they had that concern, they could just not sign and the whole project wouldn't work. So they got very good at thinking about the game theory of how do we, it's really, I think it's Hume's veil of ignorance. Right. The idea is you only make laws that you don't need to, oh, is it? No, it's Rawls. Yeah. It's Rawls. Yeah. You don't want to make a rule that you wouldn't want to live on the wrong side. If you want a rule that you like, whether or not you're the person, you know, administering it or the person being faced with it. Okay. So the key thing is the American experiment, which founds the modern West, which then spreads to a bunch of countries, is first, it stems from the idea that your background, your lineage background does not entitle you to anything and it doesn't cost you anything. Now, obviously they understood that they were screwing up that paradigm as in the initial founding. The three fifths compromise was an exception to that rule, but they nonetheless instantiated that rule. And if I understand my history correctly, they would have liked to have neutralized it even in the case of what they ultimately arrived at with the three fifths compromise. But they couldn't, there was no way to found the country at that point. Slavery was too deeply ingrained. And so they kicked that can down the road. Unfortunately, tremendous embarrassment, but it's not obvious that they had a better path in the 1770s. In any case, lineage is set aside, at least at a formal level. I believe that the derives from the New Testament Christian understanding of the nature of humans. This was explicitly a secular state, but the idea coming from the story of the Good Samaritan and the Golden Rule is that who you are does not matter with respect to how we treat you. The Good Samaritan helps the guy in the ditch who has been injured in a robbery, even though they are not of the same bloodline. That's the key thing. So it sidelines that. And then they create a structure under that in which individual liberty is prioritized. The liberty for you to figure out what it is you are supposed to be doing in the world, which means everybody has to have access to the market in effect. You have to be able to decide, hey, I want to create this thing and I want to go see what this thing is worth. And it doesn't matter that somebody thinks your idea is crazy or doesn't like the way you look. You have access to the market as much as anybody else. It also means that everybody has the right to voice their opinion, that you cannot be silenced, and in particular, that governmental power cannot be used to silence you. We have equality under the law, right? It doesn't matter who you are in a court. You have the same rights as anybody else, and those rights are extensive. You have the right to private property. It's enshrined in our constitution that you have the right to own things and that being deprived of them is a sober act that can only happen under very prescribed circumstances. And finally, I would say the West is based in a profound limitation, an intentional limitation on governmental power, right? The government cannot haul you off and pretend it doesn't have you or try you in secret or any of those things. You've got rid of habeas corpus, you've got a lot of people who have a right to be seen by those who represent you, you have a right to be represented, you have a right to confront the witnesses against you, you have a right to see the evidence against you, you have a right to be tried in front of a jury of your peers, you have a right in the case of a crime to demand that the state prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, which I would remind people in the present context, it's very important to realize that is not a logical standard. It was not intended to be a logical standard. It was intended to corral government because the founders understood just how dangerous government is when it falls into the hands of somebody who is ill intentioned. So distinction you're making is it's a legal standard, not a logical one? Right. Yes. Because what it means is that lots of people for whom the majority, the preponderance of evidence suggests that they are guilty will walk free because it hasn't been moved to this extremely intentionally high standard, right? If you really wanted to catch all criminals and get them in jail, you'd make a standard of the preponderance of the evidence, the one we have in a civil court. But because the danger of governments locking up political opponents and things is so great, the founders gave us every tool to fend off that governmental power. And you have all the rights that exist that they didn't think of, they're yours, right? The 10th Amendment tells us that nothing that isn't named belongs to the government. Anything that's not named belongs to you, the citizens. So I like your framing with regard to the United States, the performing of the United States being the beginning of the modern West. And of course, there's different ways that it manifests in different places, but that sounds very much like something to preserve. I believe the fate of humanity is literally depending on either its repair and preservation or its reinvention by somebody. I do not think that the world with modern technology, including weapons, can survive if we allow that system to fall. Because what it does, remember at the top I was saying, the first tenet is, your tribe doesn't matter, right? We collaborate with each other because collaboration is good. And one of the reasons that the West was so contagious, that it spread so far from this weird founding, you know, in the new world, disconnected from the old world. The reason that it spread to so many places was because when people collaborate across genetic lines, they are vastly more productive. So the point is, this system, as unfair as it was, was just unbelievably prone to create wealth, which meant that even if you were on the losing end of it, you were probably better off than being somewhere else. So when people saw that, how productive it was, and that, you know, one of the things I probably should have done for today's podcast was come up with a list of all of the inventions that were produced in America and in the larger West. It's all of these transformative things. Why? Because at some level lineage was demoted and collaboration was the thing to do because if you wanted to live better, being productive was a good thing to do. Generating wealth was the right way to do it. So everybody had an incentive to do that. Everybody had access to the market. You collaborated with whoever brought the right stuff to the table rather than the person who had your nose shape. And that thing caused people to want in. And for a long time, they did want in. And if they couldn't get in, they wanted to create the same thing back home because it was just better. So that contagiousness of the West is now has gone in reverse. We're now inviting in people who don't even like it. Right? These people are in general, not even old enough to have seen it work well. They're watching it in decay and collapse, being sabotaged by people from within the West itself. And, you know, of course it doesn't sell itself anymore. But the problem is that what replaces it if the West falls is lineage against lineage violence, because that's what it looked like before. That's the more stable system. Our system is better, but it has a fragility to it. It collapses back into that other thing, which is exactly what you're seeing in the Middle East. Which is part of why legal immigration for people who want to partake of the West and produce according to the rules, rights, and responsibilities of the West is a boon to the West because it decreases the chances that you will have lineage on lineage violence. Because once you have an actually integrated society in which people of all the demographics are working side by side, profitably and productively and creatively and happily, then you stop focusing on nose shape and skin color and all of that. But instead we are focusing more and more and more in part because we are told we have to, in part because we have opened the borders and are letting in people who don't actually want to be part of the West, and in part because we have stopped honoring our actual obligations to people who are already here and enforcing on them that they not destroy where they live. So it feels like many different pieces, but it's actually all about preserving the West. Whether it's the fentanyl addicts hanging out in their ventilines across the West Coast, or the immigrants in Paris burning down Paris, or the homeless encampments that are the bathrooms in Seattle that are being broken so they can't function weeks before they're existing for. All of this is of a piece, which is we need the West, we have benefited from the West, we will continue to thrive under the rules and responsibilities of the West, and it is giving up on those which many politicians who call themselves liberals have done, which is causing the decline. Yep, and I would just add one thing. It's always uncomfortable for me to say it because I know that a tremendous number of people who will resonate with what we've just said will rebel against it, but the key thing to prevent this anti-Western violence and anger from bubbling over is to, if the system gets fixed, it has to be built in such a way that you don't fall off the bottom. Things should not be good for you if you're not being productive, but if you decide, "Hey, screw them, they didn't produce anything, they were lazy," maybe you're even right, but do you really want to sentence their kids to a life from which getting back to the market is impossible because their parents sucked? What you want is to protect people from falling off the bottom so they never have an incentive to destroy your civilization because they couldn't possibly claw their way back up. You want everybody to be within shooting range of bettering themselves. Maybe it takes three generations to get to somewhere that you would put up with, but nobody, I mean, religions know this. The reason that Catholics, the Christians, have the ability to get back into God's good graces, no matter what you've done, is because you never want to create people who can't get back. If you've done so much sinning that in God's eyes you're a lost cause, what is your incentive not to continue tearing stuff up? You don't have one. The point is you always want people to have a reason to fix what they're doing wrong, and if they can't fix what they're doing wrong, you want their children to fix it, right? That is the way to stabilize the West so that it does not face repeated communist overthrow, right? The communist overthrow comes from the fact that we've got a bunch of people who correctly understand there's a lot of cheating and they're on the losing end and they're not getting back, so they might as well destroy the public toilets in their city so that the world has a you know a terrible time at the World Cup. Well I will say I have a caveat that I think is a pretty big one to what you just said, which is that what you're talking about I think applies to the immigrants that aren't actually interested in the West, but could be shown a path for which they will have to work hard by which they could start to enjoy the rights and responsibilities of the West. That doesn't work for people who are addicted to some of these new drugs. So we live in a brave new world, pharmaceutical, and you mentioned this, we talked about this last week and you specifically talked about the novelty of fentanyl in particular, but I believe this holds for many of these strong psychotropics and in the case of fentanyl I guess it's an opioid, but these strong mind-altering psychotropic drugs for which we have no evolutionary history or political history. I don't know what the answer is, but continuing to just let people do what they're doing there and be alive, that's the only thing they are, some of them, right, is alive. And you know we've talked about this before, but I remember when we were living in Portland and we were suddenly what was being recommended was that everyone carries an arcan with them and to me this felt this was like one of the horsemen of the apocalypse, like not that we don't have the whole horde of horsemen at this point, but like you're gonna put a burden on me to take a risky act and save someone who has no interest in saving themselves. To what end? What are they gonna do tomorrow? They're gonna go seek their next high because that's what these drugs do. Is that person not a real person? That person's a real person, but their consciousness has evaporated. It's gone. And what we do with the people who have succumbed to drugs that never should have existed, I don't know, but it's not the same thing. Well I want to broaden that a little bit because I think the problem, there are many different flavors of the same problem, right? You don't let the kids on the playground figure out how to behave so that people want to hang out with them, they never do, right? You you know embolden people who have a gender confusion, they never correct themselves. We even have this problem with things like you know antidepressants. You know I... This is I mean including that's the psychotropics, the antidepressants, the anti-anxiety, the anti... Oh okay, then I agree with this, but I want to just point out what it means. If you've got a young person who is dysregulated, A) we're trusting you to decide that they're dysregulated and that you know maybe they're responding to a home life that's chaotic and their what seems like a dysregulated response is actually a natural response to a chaotic situation or whatever. But if you correct their presentation to the world with these drugs, they are then dependent on the presence of those drugs to be regulated and will be forever. Hence Laura Delano's amazing work on how to actually get off these things which takes forever in many cases. But the point being these in order to make functional adults, the self-correction algorithm has to be allowed to function and the SSRIs in particular are disrupting the very informational structure that would allow you to become functional, predicated on a now we understand wrong hypothesis of mental illness, the chemical imbalance idea. Chemical imbalance idea never made any sense, but we've now destroyed the feedback that allows people to build functional lives predicated on a scientific fiction. And even now that we know it's a fiction, we're still doing it. So anyway, I think we have to stop. If you want to fix civilization, good developmental environments that give a strong signal to noise ratio that allows you to correct yourself so that you fit and work and can function is going to be the key. And all of these technological interventions are a dead end from the get-go. They are a dead end from the get-go. We should begin by not lying to children, letting them play, letting them explore their identity and their surroundings themselves, and teaching them from a young age that they are agentic, agentic, that they have the capacity to live a life of their choosing. And they are born in a particular circumstance limited and bounded by that circumstance, but they can find the ways to unlimited and unbound or they can stay canalized, but that is on them. And you don't tell that to a two-year-old, but you can begin to model it in how you behave. And you can begin to say that to a 12-year-old, that you are the master of your own life. This is what the choices that you make are going to follow you around and make you who you are. And so at the point that we end up with, you know, you mentioned our friend Laura Delano, you know, she pulled herself out of a spiral that was extraordinary due to the incredibly large cocktail of psychotropic medicines, medications that she was on, drugs. Why do I even use the word medications? Psychotropic drugs that she was put on because a series of doctors informed her that she needed them and ultimately that her non-responsiveness to them was an indication of an even deeper failure in her own brain than was actually true, which none of which is true. She, somewhat uniquely, it is rare for an individual to have pulled herself out so completely of the psychotropic drug spiral that she was in, and now she and husband Cooper Davis are working to bring some of what they have both learned in this to the world. Many people don't have that, don't have the resolve by the time that they are so deep into farmland to begin to know how to pull out. And you know, fentanyl zombies on the street and people in psychotropic farmland space may seem very, very different and in some ways they are, but in both cases we don't, we can't treat them the same way that we treat, say, the immigration problem. In all cases though, there is an individual with agency somewhere in there and it is our responsibility to them to help them find it, but it's ultimately their responsibility to find it. And if they spend time after time after time, intervention after intervention after intervention, not finding their own agency, it does not continue to, it should not, it cannot continue to be our collective problem. Try this on. The right often focuses on personal responsibility. I think they are correct about this, that this is one of the places that liberals often get things wrong. Personal responsibility is key. This was Bob Woodson's message. Even if your situation is unfair, you'd be a fool not to take personal responsibility for doing as well with the bad hand you were dealt as you can do, but at the same time the individual is entitled to an accurate stream of information from the world to the extent that we distort the world that the child encounters out of an desire to make them comfortable or whatever, or to get them treated better than the outside world is going to treat them. It denies them the very material that would allow them to take personal responsibility. I think these two things are different and that they go hand in hand. You have a right to an accurate interaction with the world from which you can take personal responsibility and better yourself so that you have a life that is more satisfying and meaningful to you. And anyway, I wonder if we don't need a name for that thing. You were entitlement to an undistorted interaction with the world. I think there's something right here. I'm hesitant. I'm skeptical because entitlement has been a big problem. People on the left have claimed rights that were never theirs. They have claimed things that humans have rights to that are fictions. I don't like the idea of adding more things to what we are entitled to, more things to have their definitions change out from under us, more things for us to have groups of people who are moderating them and understanding whether or not people are getting the thing that they need. But ultimately what you were saying is freedom from those who would warp your reality. Most of those who would warp reality historically was corporate influence. We talked about last week subliminal advertising and those who would enhance the sugar content in your food to make it more addictive and things that seem so almost sweet by comparison to what we are experiencing now. In part, the problem is now those who would distort reality on their behalf, claiming on our behalf, whatever it is, are not always easily identified as coming in the form of corporations. They're often individuals that sound nice. They're social workers. They're elementary school teachers. They're politicians. They're people who say that the way to live a good life is to always be kind and always to let the other person go and always let the criminals into the border and always give the zarkan, the Narcan to the person passed out in a fentanyl coma and they're wrong. Some of them know it. Some of them know it, but many of them don't. I don't know how we reach these people. Well, like the the the people who just get off on feeling virtuous by behaving extraordinarily badly, but because they never actually hit anyone, they feel like they're the good people. I agree with you, but I think what I'm pointing to is a feature of some kind of natural law above human law. Of course, you're entitled not to have somebody distort what comes into your eyes so that you can navigate. I think it's a direct reflection of the right enumerated by the founding fathers to the pursuit of happiness. You can't pursue happiness if somebody's put VR goggles on you and you think you're headed to a lovely garden and instead you're going off a cliff. So the point is I at least have the right to look at the world for myself. Right. Don't distort what I get to see, what I get to hear from other people to the extent that you are distorting those things. You are maiming future me. You don't have the right to do that. Good. Good. Okay, we'll be back next Tuesday rather than Wednesday. And in the meantime, if you're looking for more more stuff, check out Natural Selections. Bret has his Patreon calls this weekend. Join Locals to get access to our Discord server, Q&A's, all that. Our sponsors this week. 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